COMMENTARY: Public Schools Doing Their Jobs

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — There is good news for public schools in Elkins and Springdale.

An Elkins history teacher was fired and then arrested for sexual encounters with a student. The interim school superintendent, Tom Louks, called Fayetteville police immediately upon learning of the situation.

Louks suspended the teacher right after police questioned him, and the Elkins School Board fired him two weeks later.

This spring, Springdale Public Schools had three volunteer coaches arrested for various combinations of assault, sexual assault, and promoting prostitution.

So where is the good news in all that?

The cold fact is that schools are staffed by people, and people are imperfect. Heck, some are not even adequate.

Given imperfect human nature, the true test of a school (or any organization) is not whether some staff and volunteers are guilty of immorality, illegality, or just plain incompetence, but rather how leaders act when they find out.

On this vital dimension, Elkins and Springdale seem to have performed well. As near as I can tell, school officials didn’t cover anything up, didn’t make any excuses, and brought in the police at the first sign of trouble. In the real world, you really can’t expect more than that.

And unfortunately in the real world, that is not always how things work.

At my own high school, a friend was groped by a teacher. When she reported this to the vice-principal, he warned of dire consequences - for her - if she went public. Inaddition to the “groper” my school had a teacher who took boys on “camping trips.” A third teacher eventually married one of his charges.

Of course that was back in the free-wheeling 1970s. But years later, in the 2000s, as Walter Polka and Peter Litchka describe in “The Dark Side of Educational Leadership,” a superintendent outraged the local teachers union and was fired by his school board for refusing to cover up a teacher’s “inappropriate conduct with a student.”

I’m familiar with cases in which children suffered after their parents reported unprofessional behavior on the part of school officials.

And it isn’t always about sex.

Back in 2005 my friend Joe Carruth, the newly appointed principal of Brimm Medical Arts High School in Camden, N.J., uncovered a cheating scandal in which a guidance counselor was changing grades. After reporting this to his superiors, Joe suffered retaliation. He was ordered to prepare the school budget for the coming year in 48 hours, knowing that if he made any mistakes he could be accused of spending money out of category. Months later Joe was fired when he refused a superior’s direct order to cheat on standardized tests. After Camden’s test scores went from among the worst in New Jersey to among the best in a single year, the state investigated and the Camden superintendent was given a golden parachute to go away. But JoeCarruth didn’t get a payoff; he’s still looking for work.

Clearly, dishonesty is the best policy in some places.

Most depressing of all, some education intellectuals maintain that public schools should cover up unethical behavior. In explaining why traditional public schools handle scandals better than relatively transparent charter schools, Arizona State University Regents Professor Gene Glass, one of the leaders in my field, writes in his Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips that “Poor performance and illegal behavior exist in the traditional public school sector, and they are frequently dealt with.

But they are usually dealt with in subtle ways that protect the dignity of the individuals involved while protecting the integrity of the school” (pp.164-65).

It seems to me that this is just the sort of thinking that got the Catholic Church in trouble with its child sexual abuse scandals.

Luckily, this is not the sort of thinking that prevails in Northwest Arkansas public schools. A culture is set from the top down, and superintendents like Gary Compton in Bentonville, Janie Darr in Rogers, Jim Rollins in Springdale and now Vicki Thomas in my own Fayetteville have made it clear through their actions that they will not tolerate unethical behavior.

I wish all public institutions had that kind of leadership.

ROBERT MARANTO IS THE 21ST CENTURY CHAIR IN LEADERSHIP IN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION REFORM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS. WITH RICHARD E. REDDING AND FREDERICK M. HESS, HE CO-EDITED “THE POLITICALLY CORRECT UNIVERSITY.”